SSL Certificate Formats

An SSL Certificate is essentially an X.509 certificate. X.509 is a standard that defines the structure of the certificate. It defines the data fields that should be included in the SSL certificate. X.509 uses a formal language called Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1) to express the certificate's data structure.

There are different formats of X.509 certificates such as PEM, DER, PKCS#7 and PKCS#12. PEM and PKCS#7 formats use Base64 ASCII encoding while DER and PKCS#12 use binary encoding. The certificate files have different extensions based on the format and encoding they use.

The following figure illustrates the X.509 Certificate's encoding formats and file extensions.